"If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. ... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

The Downing Street memo consisted of minutes from a July 2002 meeting of British labor, defense and intelligence officials during the run-up to the Iraq War, in which the MI6 head, Richard Dearlove, reportedly said that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

These notes from a British cabinet meeting were called the smoking gun of Bush's lying his way into war. The Downing Street memo was written about in dozens of New York Times articles—including six hysterical Frank Rich op-eds. It has been mentioned more than a hundred times in The Washington Post. It was covered on ABC's "Nightline," by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," on NBC's "Meet the Press"—even on the "Today" show. It was discussed nightly on MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann covered it like it was Kim Kardashian and he was the E! Network.

But when the Downing Street memo came out, conservatives weren't allowed to say, Yeah, well, the British memo writer didn't have anything to do with the president's decision to go to war—even though that guy really didn't have anything to do with it.

Those weren't Tony Blair's notes. They were a secretary's interpretation of the MI6 chief's interpretation of the Bush administration's argument to the United Nations. It's like a movie review, written by someone who knew someone who had seen the movie.

Gruber had more than a dozen meetings at the White House during the drafting of Obamacare. The Downing Street memo writer had no meetings at the Bush White House. Even the guy he was quoting had only one.

The outrage over the Downing Street memo concerned the claim—in the memo writer's words—that the intelligence was being "fixed" around a policy. Although a number of commentators claimed that the British meaning of "fixed" is more like "arranged," let's assume "fixed" implies trickery.

It's still one word! Gruber has given six different speeches rambling at length about how Obamacare was intended to deceive "stupid" voters.

You can't say the Downing Street memo was a totally legitimate news story, but that the Gruber tapes are meaningless.

Ninety-nine percent of Americans were utterly unaffected by the invasion of Iraq—other than to be made safer, until Obama threw our victory away. Every American is affected by Obamacare.